Post OpenHatch

A couple weeks ago I attended the Free Software Foundation’s annual conference, Libre Planet, held at UMass Boston a bit south of downtown. I enjoyed the event considerably, but can only give brief impressions of some of the sessions I saw.

John Sullivan, Matt Lee, Josh Gay started with a welcome and talk about some recent FSF campaigns. I think Sullivan said they exceeded their 2011 membership goal, which is great. Join. (But if I keep to my refutation schedule, I’m due to tell you why you shouldn’t join in less than 5 years.)

Rubén Rodríguez spoke about Trisquel, a distribution that removes non-free software and recommendations from Ubuntu (lagging those releases by about 5 months) and makes other changes its developers consider user-friendly, such as running GNOME 3 in fallback mode and some Web (an IceWeasel-like de-branded Firefox) privacy settings. I also saw a lightning talk from someone associated with ThinkPenguin, which sells computers pre-loaded with Trisquel.

Asheesh Laroia spoke about running events that attract and retain newcomers. You can read about OpenHatch (the organization he runs) events or see a more specific presentation he recently gave at PyCon with Jessica McKellar. The main point of humor in the talk concerned not telling potential developers to download a custom built VM to work with your software: it will take a long time, and often not work.

Joel Izlar’s talk was titled Digital Justice: How Technology and Free Software Can Build Communities and Help Close the Digital Divide about his work with Free IT Athens.

Brett Smith gave an update on the FSF GPL compliance Lab, including mentioning MPL 2.0 and potential CC-BY-SA 4.0 compatibility with GPLv3 (both of which I’ve blogged about before), but the most interesting part of the talk concerned his participation in Trans-Pacific Partnership Stakeholder Forums; it sounded like software freedom concerns got a more welcome reception than expected.

Yukihiro ‘matz’ Matsumoto spoke on how Emacs changed his life, including introducing him to programming, free software, and influencing the design of Ruby.

Matthew Garrett spoke on Preserving user freedoms in the 21st century. Perhaps the most memorable observation he made concerned how much user modification of software occurs without adequate freedom (making the modifications painful), citing CyanogenMod.

I mostly missed the final presentations in order to catch up with people I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise, but note that Matsumoto won the annual Advancement of Free Software award, and GNU Health the Free Software Award for Projects of Social Benefit. Happy hacking!

I last looked closely at a new micropatronage/crowdfunding site 2 years ago, having resolved that nobody was likely to take an interesting or well executed approach to the idea that would end up making a significant impact. Since then I’ve heard in passing of a number of new projects that fit my low expectations, but also two that appear very well executed and successful on a scale large enough that it isn’t ridiculous to imagine this sort of mechanism becoming important at least for cultural production — MyMajorCompany (French; a few English links gathered here) and Kickstarter.

The occasion of this post is Fred Benenson’s announcement that he’s joining Kickstarter after having done outreach and product management for Creative Commons for the last year and a half (and involved as an intern and activist for much longer). It’s sad to see them go, but great to see recent CC alumni start or join projects that at least have the potential to be important enablers of the free and open world — in addition to Fred, also Asheesh Laroia (OpenHatch) and Jon Phillips (StatusNet).

Congratulations all!

It also feels good to hire people at Creative Commons who have demonstrated some commitment and capacity nearby — Fred, Asheesh, and Jon were all examples of that, and more recently Chris Webber, who was a Miro hacker before coming to CC.